My Struggle: Book One by Karl Knausgaard Page B

So we’ll be with you in fifteen.”
    â€œI’ve got to think.”
    It was then I noticed that the cat was lying in the chair beside the telephone. It looked at me, started licking one paw. In the living room the vacuum cleaner roared into life. The cat turned its head in the direction of the sound. The next second it relaxed. I leaned over and stroked its chest.
    â€œYou can’t drive all the way up. That’s no good. But we can just leave the bags at the roadside somewhere. No one will find them up here anyway.
    â€œBottom of the hill maybe?”
    â€œBelow the house?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBottom of the hill below the house in fifteen minutes?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAll right. So remember to tell Tom not to turn around in our drive, and not by the mailboxes either. There’s a shoulder a bit higher up the road. Can he use that?”
    â€œOkay. See you.”
    I hung up and went into the living room to Mom. She switched off the vacuum cleaner when she saw me.
    â€œI’m off to see Per,” I said. “Just want to wish him a happy new year.”
    â€œFine,” Mom said. “Send our regards if you see his parents.”
    Per was a year younger than me and lived in the neighboring house acouple of hundred meters down the hill. He was the person I spent the most time with in the years we lived here. We played soccer as often as we could, after school, on Saturdays and Sundays, during vacations, and a lot of that was spent finding enough players for a decent game, but if we couldn’t, we played two-a-side for hours, and if we couldn’t do that, it was just Per and me. I booted the ball at him, he booted it at me, I crossed to him, he crossed it to me, or we played twosies, as we called it. We did this, day in, day out, even after I had started at the gymnas. Otherwise we went swimming, either under the waterfall, in the deep part of the pool and where you could dive from a rock, or down by the rapids where the torrent swept us along. When the weather was too bad to do anything outside, we watched a video in their cellar or just hung around chatting in the garage. I liked being there, his family was warm and generous, and even though his father could not stand me I was welcome all the same. Yet despite the fact that Per was the person I spent the most time with, I did not consider him a friend, I never mentioned him in any other context, both because he was younger than me, which was not good, and because he was a country boy. He wasn’t interested in music, hadn’t a clue about it, he wasn’t interested in girls or drinking either, he was quite content to sit at home with his family on the weekends. Turning up for school in rubber boots didn’t bother him, he was just as happy walking around in knitted sweaters and cords as jeans he’d outgrown and T-shirts emblazoned with Kristiansand Zoo. When I first moved here he had never been to Kristiansand on his own. He had hardly ever read a book, what he liked was comics, which for that matter I also read, but always alongside the endless list of MacLean, Bagley, Smith, Le Carré, and Follet books I devoured, and which I eventually got him interested in as well. We went to the library together some Saturdays, and to Start FC’s home games every other Sunday, we trained with the soccer team twice a week, in the summer we played matches once a week, in addition to which we walked together to and from the school bus every day. But we didn’t share the same seat, for the closer we got to school and the life there, the less of a friend Per became, until by the time we got to the playground we had no contact at all. Strangelyenough, he never protested. He was always happy, always open, had a well-developed sense of humor and was, like the rest of his family, a warm person. Over the Christmas period I had been down to his place a couple of times, we had watched some videos and we had skied